It’s an ill wind that blows no good.

--Proverb

An ill wind has been blowing out of the White House for the past year and it portends no good for America or, for that matter, most of humanity or the Earth.

The source of the wind is the current president, Donald Trump, and not a day goes by that he doesn’t take to his Twitter account to issue threats, orders, warnings, and shouts of his singular brilliance and dominance. His bloviating started long before his campaign for the presidency and the country has had to bear witness to his base mutterings throughout the campaign, in which he boasted of his prowess in every endeavor and called his fellow Republicans some of the most demeaning names, in the most contemptuous way, to bring them down to his level. He won.

During all that time, however, many members of his own party speculated that he was not up for the job of president and said so out loud, in front of cameras, in public, and now, the book-length account of the inner workings of the White House, titled Fire and Fury, by Michael Wolff, has caused the president to act even more unhinged.

He stood before the country and reminded Americans that he was elected president on his “first try,” without any prior experience in politics or government. Then, to cap that, he announced to those who question his intelligence, his competence, and his mental stability, that he qualifies as not just smart, “but genius…and a very stable genius at that!” People who are smart and mentally stable usually do not announce that they are super intelligent or geniuses. Even bona fide geniuses have not been known to do that. If you did such a thing, even your friends would laugh you out of the room, and imagine what the American people (excluding his cult like base) are thinking. Statements such as these, which come out of the Trump White House daily, are the reasons that Trump has made the U.S. a laughingstock of the world. The nation might be a laughingstock, but the world still fears bully-boy America.

U.S. allies are unsure that they can depend on the U.S. to play its part in bringing stability and peace to the most conflicted parts of the world. In fact, the U.S. president is doing his best every day to play with the fire of nuclear war, taunting North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un that his nuclear button is bigger than Kim’s. Trump’s utterances are a daily reminder that he has no idea about the import of his ramblings and he seems to forget that he is the president of the most powerful country in the world, at least in military and weapons might. It could be, of course, that he is envious of the way Kim can order his small nation to bend to his will or whim at any moment. Trump would like that kind of power, but he doesn’t have it, yet.

Since the advent of Trump in the White House, the U.S. has lost its leadership role on most fronts, including military, diplomatic, and environmental. Because of his instability and mind-numbing changes of policy or opinion that can happen within a day, the president is looked upon by many as someone to ignore, for example, in the effort to mitigate climate change. States are taking up the challenge to alleviate climate change, since Trump pulled the country out of the Paris Climate Accord, leaving this country as the only outlier.

His ability to ignore everything outside of his own ego is remarkable, and it shows in his inability to address any problems of the American people, as most humans would. He has not visited any of the pockets of misery that have been with us for generations, where people routinely go to bed hungry or wondering where their next meal is coming from, or whether they are going to be evicted from their homes. He appears not to have thought of these citizens as people. They are his mind’s version of flyover country. The jobs he promised to coal miners during the campaign, when he said he would bring coal back, never materialized and they will not. His promises are lost in the ether, unfulfilled, never to be brought up again.

One thing that Trump said during the campaign that made sense was that the U.S. should have better and more peaceful relations with Russia, the other nuclear powerhouse in the world. It is not clear at this time why he said that. It would just make sense that those two nations were not brought to the brink of war. The investigation of his and his campaign’s contacts with Russia will reveal whether he had a brilliant stroke of diplomatic foresight or that he had business deals cooking with other oligarchs. He was, however, brought to heel on improved Russia relations by those inside government and outside who need an enemy on which to focus. They’re used to the Soviet Union, now Russia, as the enemy and they want to keep it that way.

Like so many right-wingers before him, he has masterfully stirred up the fires of racism, Islamophobia, and white supremacy by his actions (or lack of them) in Charlottesville and other places, where he equated those struggling for civil rights with white supremacists. And, he showed his disdain and racism for NFL football players who have knelt during the national anthem before games. The kneeling is a form of protest of police brutality around the country and the discrimination that is inherent in America, the result of the lingering taint of slavery that never has been cleansed from America’s soul. He referred to the peaceful protesters as sons-of-bitches and said that they should be fired. Most of them are black.

Without going into a discourse on the hole in the middle of Trump’s psyche, there is a litany of things that he is missing, including empathy for other humans, a fifth-grader’s knowledge of American and world history, a grammar school grasp of geography and international relations, the gravity of climate change (even grade schoolers recognize it) and the will to do something about it, and the lack of any resolution of the remains of slavery…today’s era of mass incarceration, in which people of color are the main ones imprisoned and which replicates too much of the worst brutality of slavery. Has he mentioned the poor conditions in which a fifth of Americans live? He hasn’t, and he is not likely to, because to address an issue of such magnitude he would have to string two related sentences together and he seems unable to do that. Trump’s litany of negatives is long, and additions are made every day and they are adequately covered by the mass press and credible alternative sources (they do indeed exist).

The debate about his fitness for the office of president is raging across the country and, every day, he adds another word or deed that shows his unfitness. But removal of a president, whether by impeachment or the language of the 25^th Amendment, is a considerable process. Republicans were able to see the danger (and express it) of a Trump presidency during the campaign. Trump hasn’t changed, but the GOP has. Now, it’s up to the Republicans, as much as anyone, to put the nation before their party and frankly assess the damage Trump is doing to America, to the world, and to their own political party. They, along with the other elements of a free society, need to act to mitigate the damage Trump has done and prevent further (and worse) damage.